296 THE AGE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

ill-clad, ill-nourished. Women's clubs, for example, devoted
their programs increasingly to these matters rather than
"mere literature" or flower gardens. The acute suffering of the
Great Depression and its aftermath thus fostered a tenderer
social conscience, calling attention to a stratum of chronic
misery—among slum dwellers, sweated labor, underprivileged
children, submarginal farmers, sharecroppers and other classes
—that long antedated the current emergency. In response
came a variety of reforms and palliatives like slum clearance
and model housing, new legislation against child labor, wage-
and-hour laws, rural resettlement, loans to struggling farmers
and the furtherance of soil conservation*

Above all, the idea of social security took root in American
life, seeking to protect the individual against hazards beyond
his power to control, whether out-of-school youth in quest
of his birthright, or maturity facing the risks of illness, in-
dustrial accidents and technological unemployment, or old
age confronting the ultimate joblessness* Recalling James
Bryce's analysis of this generation's fathers and grandfathers,
the sociologists who in 1935 took another look at Middle-
town observed, "The most striking difference lies in the
emphasis Americans placed, according to Lord Bryce, on the
adventurous and the new in contrast to the emphasis Middle-
town now places on the tried and the safe/' Many people
in the 1930's staked their faith upon the New Deal's promise
of security, while others pined for the old order "which had
made America great/* cherishing individual enterprise and
free competition in their apprehension of radicalism and
revolution. But from either side the basic urge remained curi-
ously the same.

Roosevelt himself and the majority of his adherents saw
nothing radical or revolutionary—in the pejorative sense—
about the New Deal, arguing indeed that it promoted indi-
vidual enterprise and free competition precisely because it
favored small business over big business, the average citizen
against monopoly, collective bargaining against concentrated